Interviews

Yuke's and THQ on Smackdown vs. Raw 2009

Next we sat down with THQ's Senior Creative Manager, Cory Ledesma to pick his brain about working with Yuke's, managing a WWE property, and what he's most excited about for Smackdown vs. Raw 2009.

GameSpy: We just had the chance to chat with some of the Yuke's team about Smackdown vs. Raw 2009.

Cory Ledesma, Senior Creative Manager: Oh, you did? They're such a passionate bunch. That's something you don't see in a lot of developers as far as enthusiasm about making a game. I've seen them absolutely trip out after meeting a superstar.

GameSpy: Must be one of the perks of the job. What's it like working closely with a Japanese developer on a product like Smackdown?

Cory Ledesma: It's a long-standing relationship. We've had a relationship with them for over ten years now, so that trust has been established, the relationship is there, and it's very strong. So it's fantastic to work with them.

Of course there are challenges in working with a Japanese developer, but those are just language barriers. We have tons of translators on our staff. We have the opportunity to go over there and meet with them plenty of times over the year to get some face time with them. And we also have videoconferences where we video in with them. We have plenty of opportunities to communicate with them, and they're fantastic to work with. No other developer has the same fighting game experience, the passion for the WWE. That makes our job so easy. They're excited about each year's new games and features, and they want to make it very authentic.

GameSpy: What challenges are there in trying to make the wrestling games capture the more creative entertainment aspect of wrestling, as opposed to the sports aspect?

Cory Ledesma: The challenge is really in the superstar personalities. We can make a fighting game, and we can have the superstars fight differently, but how do you bring in the personalities in a match. That's the tough part. In the past we've done it with taunts and voiceovers. We want to do it in a lot of different ways. We talked about how we want the AI to act like a superstar. That's a big part of it. It's one thing to fight a big guy, but another thing to fight the Undertaker. He acts differently and does certain moves in the ring. It's about bringing out the personalities, and not having lifeless personalities in the ring. They have certain skillsets, but we want to bring out their personalities in the game.

We're never short on ideas, we have a huge wishlist of ideas. People always ask, "is it hard to come up with ideas?" It's more like us wanting to fit in twenty things, and only getting three. As far as that aspect, it's never a challenge to try for something new.

GameSpy: In your presentation, you stated that you really wanted to address what the critics said about last year's game. Is this a situation where you're tailoring this year's ideas towards addressing them, or hoping that what you already had for 2009 being enough to appeal to what the critics want?

Cory Ledesma: It's a very good question, and there's a couple reasons why we're taking this approach. The experiences from the last game that we're addressing are core parts of the game, and they frustrated users. We want to eliminate the frustration. We're talking about AI not being intelligent, repetitive commentary, loading times being too long. Our goal is to eliminate frustration. We want this to be a fun experience, and making it so there's not a whole lot of room for complaints. The way we identified those is by looking at the press reviews about the game, and seeing what those frustrations are. When we get the fans in to see what the frustrations are, they're not always forthcoming. They'll say, "oh, it's good..." But they're being too nice, and don't want to really tell us what's wrong.

The press on the other hand will give us an honest review of the game, and tell us what the fans are looking for. We want you to have a great overall experience, and identifying those key areas was our approach.

GameSpy: So there's a big disparity between your testers and the press reviews?

Cory Ledesma: It's very rare that you see differences between the two. It's similar to what I mentioned, where the fans are annoyed by something, but they can't quite identify it. The press has the trained eye to be able to identify those things, they review thousands of games, so they have something to compare their experience to.

Sometimes the users can't pinpoint what's wrong. They'll say that playing the game was hard, but when asked what about it was hard, they can't really identify the specifics. We'll ask if it was the controls, or some other aspect, but then you're baiting them and you can get skewed results. That's why we respect the reviews. These things have been mentioned in reviews for years, they're not something that we can hide from, so we're not going to dance around it.